ByteDance Sabotage Case Reversal: "Intern A" Called Fabricated as Outlets Reconstruct Two-Year Saga
elsewhere别处发生 · wechat · 2026-10-19
Outlet "elsewhere" issued a statement acknowledging insufficient cross-verification in its Tian Keyu podcast, and published a long-form reconstruction of the ByteDance model-sabotage case.
- "Intern A" controversy: The person Tian blamed for his attack on the Goku project publicly denied existing as a single individual, calling it a composite fabricated from several victims' traits; if anyone fits, it's him—the first to discover the malicious code.
- Attack details worse than admitted: GitHub03 lists eight methods, including tampering with PyTorch source on the training cluster, randomly killing training processes, and planting backdoors via checkpoints to auto-trigger—disguised as random failures. Investigators say attacks trace to Tian's accounts; he allegedly joined debugging to adjust sabotage and kept logging into others' machines after partial suspension—contradicting his claim of only five brief shutdowns and no attack-defense.
- Timeline problems: earliest attack dates to March 2024 (tampered LlamaGen's flan-t5 weights), before the June compute-allocation meeting; VAR training was done and Goku not yet founded, weakening the resource-rivalry motive.
- Aftermath: ByteDance's Oct 2024 notice and 80.2M-yuan civil suit (verdict June 2026: 500K yuan); VAR still won NeurIPS 2024 Best Paper via blind review.
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